Citigroup to Shed $500B in assets !
Citigroup to Shed $500B in assets
hip tip, if you have to shed assets… they probably weren’t really assets in the first place
Archive for May, 2008
Websitepulse - not so good
Just a quick recommendation. We were using Websitepulse as one of our extra, external monitoring systems. They consistently failed to alert us to issues (when the other systems worked). Yet, we were paying them around $80 a month. For a simple task, they should have been able to excel at the task. With all of their customers, they should have quite a margin to pay for network and infrastructure. Yet they failed.
This just goes to show… you always have overlap whenever possible when dealing with outside vendors.
Atari Catalog 1981
Steve sent me this a few weeks back…
The above catalog was the first one I saw. To an 11 year old brain, the possibilities of that machine for fun seemed as amazing as those illustrations.
Firefox Search Shortcuts - the Keyboard Returns to Power
A while back, I was watching Scott Cruzen browse to a site via Firefox. Quite the clever guy, he was just using the address bar to do searches. For example, if he was searching for widgets on google, he could just do:
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g widgets
if he was searching wikipedia, he could just do:
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wp widgets
if he was searching ebay, he could just do:
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e widgets
… and so on… all right in the address bar. This was quite cool since it let you perform this without having your hands leave the keyboard. (Note: to get to the address bar via the keyboard hit ALT-D on a PC or ALT-L on a Mac). This was very cool, so I had to copy Scott’s trick and it has become a standard modification on my Firefox.
It is really easy to install, as well. All you have to do is right click on any search box on any site, and choose ‘Add a Keyword for this Search…’. Then you get a dialog box that only requires a name and the ’shortcut sequence’. It then stores these shortcuts as bookmarks.
Just yesterday, I showed this to a co-worker. Today he thanked me for this trick. He started adding shortcuts for all sorts of sites that he uses. Oddly enough, I only used it for Wikipedia. I had never thought of using it for stock quotes. I immediately did the same and added shortcuts for a bunch of sites that I frequent for simple searches (stock quotes, whois, etc.)
This got me thinking about keyboards in general. This is a consistent trend with the power users on GUI/Window systems. They want the power to invoke a simple or complex action, as quickly as possible. If you are using a computer a lot, chances are that your hands are almost always on the keyboard. YET, if you look at the history of Windowing systems, the point was to get away from the keyboard for actions.
It wasn’t until I worked at Plaxo, that I really got to appreciate the power of the keyboard. One of the founders there, Cam, was a master of the keyboard and its shortcuts. He could perform the same operations that I was doing with a mouse about 10x faster. He was able to do this because Windows has excellent keyboard navigation support from the 80’s. He mastered that system and he was blindingly fast on his computer.
At the same time, the trend was obvious on other platforms as well. Look at what any Mac user says about Quicksilver… they love it. They cannot imagine their machine without it. (In a way, the Firefox shortcut system is like Quicksilver for the web) Look at what the Lifehacker people think about the AutoHotKey system. Even Steve Jobs changed his mind and made Spotlight a simple key sequence away (ALT-SPACE).
The mouse is a great input device, but it is clear to me that empowering power users via the keyboard will only become an essential element of any system going forward.
